For The Records
by sora kazega
Summary: "We listen to songs we know with all our heart, the lyrics engraved on our souls." The boys try to reach and understand the girls through songs of yesteryear wherein their memory is strongest.


**AN: **Truly i enjoyed writing this as much as i enjoyed the movie and the book, which I read and saw only last weekend. I wrote this whilst i was still in the VS-zone and am happy with how it turned out: since what i was trying to emulate was the narrative that Eugenides wrote the book with, which i find truly marvelous and Coppola's great choice of quotes for the movie made it exactly as it should be. This is a little something about the boys and how the girls affected them later in life. It came to me as i read about the 'song conversation', and as such you should read it with them on, take your pick: "Alone Again, Naturally," Gilbert O'Sullivan "You've Got a Friend," James Taylor "Where Do the Children Play?, Cat Stevens "Dear Prudence, " The Beatles "Candle in the Wind, " Elton John "Wild Horses,"The Rolling Stones "At Seventeen, " Janice Ian us "Time in a Bottle,"Jim Croce the Lisbon girls "So Far Away," Carole Kingand most of all "Make it with you", Bread. That last one is a must!

**Disclaimer**: Coppola and Eugenides own this, I could never have come up with something this great! Nor do any of the lyrics belong to my mind as the spot of their creation.

_Italics_ = actual lyrics

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_For the Records_

Over the years we forget more and more about them, even the evidence we collected in order to try and understand the girls and their reasoning is wasting away at the hands of time. Evidently, so are we; wasting away our life as thoughts of what-ifs plague our brain continuously. How our brain and eyes make us imagine every love and lover we've had as one of them, most especially as Lux on those cold days on the roof. Tim even got to do it on a roof for real once, and yet he said: " It was so close and yet the furthest away I've ever been." What that exactly entailed even he doesn't know.

We make them put on that strawberry lipstick, that forbidden red fruit of our deepest desire, and Joe Hill Conley makes every one of them drink peach schnapps to go back in time to that one night when he had Bonnie and thus the world. He still regrets not having called when he had the chance and perhaps in some sort of act to ask for forgiveness he has an iguana as a pet. On that very same night Mary completely rejected Parkie Denton, no kiss, handshake or hug even though he'd been her date. Had even been denied the pleasure of walking her to the door, but he still stubbornly drives that Yellow Cadillac, listening to the same station that Lux had put on after finally finding her favorite song. We asked if he ever became tired of it, he shot the question right back and the ensuing silence said enough.

Chase, out of all of us, has it the worst as he blames himself for things we didn't do. For things which we didn't, don't and in all honesty probably never will understand. Yes, when Lux undid that belt buckle of his she left a part of herself behind. He smokes now and elongated that belt so that he could always wear it, as if to carry that part of her around with him forever. When another blonde undoes its clasp he'll see her standing in that room looking on with that wry and mocking smile of hers, cigarette in hand and those velvet eyes. " Never found another set like them, and I've looked."

Kevin Head tries to find Mary in girls who are just as aloof but has yet to succeed. When we ask he says with a shake of his head: "Not one of them has a capped tooth." or " They don't care about mirrors." Tim on the other hand searches for the lightest blonde of the five, Therese, and has had no better luck. Even the Ivy League girls, whom she would have become one of, didn't snare him up. We think he put it best when he said something we all agree upon: " You see those girls we meet, they don't wear the right things. No nightgowns of pure white, no white puritan dresses which hide everything and make touching the skin beneath that fabric the most sensual thing. We don't like things that reveal, because we've become addicted to the mystery. Only orange bikinis do it, man. Only goddamn orange bikinis."

During the day we see only the bare glimpses of them at times, a shimmering mirage for a hungered out man in the desert. We don't like our days and trudge through them as if it were made of hot sand resigned until night takes us away to where we want to go: a world unblemished and long gone. It's here that we quench our thirst because remembering them during the day is almost impossible, but in our dreams they are still as vivid as if they hadn't been dead for twenty years.

On the photos, exhibit #1 through #97, the colors are fading and the dimples and such details are gone and make the five of them indistinguishable from each other. In our dreams, however, we see them crystal clear: Cecilia, dreamy yellow eyes looking out to the sky whilst on her lap rests her diary unruffled whilst her own brown hair lies on her shoulders; Lux sun tanning on her green towel clad only in orange bikini and that smirk as she caught us looking, eyes crinkled in vague amusement; Bonnie like an angel, serene and serious sitting with her feather-filled jumper on the footsteps looking at the sunrise; Mary blowdrying her hair which flutters in front of an open window whilst looking in her mirror and for once smiling instead of that aloof almost bored look; and Therese, soft spoken, golden haired and too tooth filled smiling Therese as she spun round and round on the only dance she would ever go to.

We never say it out loud, never confess to it, but we know it of each other anyway. Every single one of us still gets those travel magazines and with some alcohol in our system were once again travelling trough the countries we don't know with the girls at our side only this time as a family; one of them our wife, the bearer of our children. And whilst we read these magazines of unfamiliar places we listen to songs we know with all our heart, the lyrics engraved on our souls. They are the songs we played in some absurd game of Ping-Pong on those last summer days before Lux, Bonnie, Mary and Therese joined Cecilia.

Gods, how these melodies make us dance, laugh and smile and most of all how they make us cry because no matter how much we imagine whilst listening to them we never come any closer to understanding those girls, or perhaps in a moment of broken and drunken lucidity we do, which makes us break down all the same.

Chase is most prone to these drunken spells because he carries a piece of Lux's soul, which is stronger than any we posses in memorabilia and photo's. He's the happiest in them. She talks to him, and he to her, of days long gone by when the world was full of sunshine and still innocent. When Elms still stood tall with green leaves instead of yellow and when the biggest event was touching a whale and commenting on the smell of it. And always right before she goes she unclasps that buckle, but this time she smiles. He wakes up without hang over and can go through the next few days whilst still high on a conversation with a ghost, one of _"a high school girl with a clear skin smile"._

Those lyrics, we know them so well that we've even self-styled a few of them to fit our own situation. For 'Time in a Bottle' by Jim Croce: _"If I had box full of wishes, of dreams that never came true._ Then it'd be full, each one of them there due to you." And for 'Make it with you' by Bread: "_Life can be short or long_. Yours being short made our love go wrong." The only song we could not, and never will change is Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind' because it is too fitting. "_Your candle burnt out long before your legend ever did." _It's the song that usually makes us let a few manly tears fall.

A girl once broke one of Demo Karafilis' records and it's the only time he's ever hit a girl, he wasn't sorry about it neither. It'd been ' Make it with you'; the one song that we knew meant the girls loved us too. And that is ultimately the reason why we hold on so tightly to anything of them: objects, a dream, a memory or even a phantasm or drunken hallucination. We try to find out why they did it because we want to understand and help them still twenty years post mortem.

We want to, like naïve children, make ourselves believe that love transcends time and death. When they appear, flickering like lights in their irregular pattern, we think back to that red Chinese lantern and try to figure out the message they are sending to us now. In the end, like them, we haven't truly aged or changed; were still a group of boys trying to reach for the other side, climbing on rainbows.


End file.
